Calgary’s East Village project signals a shift away from urban sprawl

New East Village project signals Calgary’s shift from urban sprawl

CALGARY — It’s almost dark in downtown Calgary and there’s no one to be seen in the East Village except for Jessica Rondeau, a producer dressed in black and carrying a lone kitchen drawer across two flat, empty construction lots to her nearby apartment.

Ms. Rondeau is renovating: She moved into one of the few nearby apartment towers in February.

Finally, she has escaped the compact homes, trim lawns and car-culture communities that have long defined Calgary.

“I hate suburbia, gah!” she says.

Ms. Rondeau was never fond of the Northeast, or the Southwest, or McKenzie Towne, a precious community seemingly master-planned down to the shrub. But with a dearth of better, more affordable downtown options, that’s where she has lived since graduating from the University of Calgary in the 1990s. That is, until the city committed to redeveloping East Village.

It sits just south of the Bow River and is bordered by a park, historic fort and an urban island. It is 15 square city blocks of land within a stone’s throw of city hall, right in Calgary’s downtown.

And it is nearly empty.

Leaving downtown and driving east to the village still gives the impression of desolation, of decades of imperfect buildings and people stamped into the dirt.

Calgary is a booming city of 1.2 million people so desperate for homes that its footprint now rivals that of Manhattan. Its fringes are filled with rows upon rows of tidy houses that seem to span the prairie without end. Yet this downtown patch was ignored, then reviled and recently bulldozed. It should be one of the most valuable plots in Calgary. Instead, the municipality has poured $150-million into the land to attract private investment. It will be the site of a new central library, a revitalized island park and the National Music Centre.

The city hopes to see more than 11,000 people living in East Village by 2027. This time, their plan may work. Condo developments are popping up like mushrooms. This week, it was announced that a Hilton would be constructed there.

“It’s going to be really cool down here, super cool,” Ms. Rondeau said. Like a proper downtown community. There will be restaurants, hotels and “hopefully a Starbucks.”

It’s an ambitious project for a neighbourhood that was once known as skid row. In the 1940s, what is now known as East Village had a reputation for flophouses, prostitutes and drunks. It’s still the site of drop-in centres and the King Edward Hotel, the first blues bar in Canada that took a weird turn as the neighbourhood went to seed. It now sits boarded up and gated: Its facade will be incorporated into the new music centre. Construction is expected to begin this year.

“Previous attempts to develop this area over the last couple of decades have fallen apart. There has never been a holistic plan for this area that either the city or other entities could support. It’s not for lack of trying,” said Susan Veres, the spokesperson for the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation.

Firstly, the neighbourhood had practically no usable infrastructure. The roads blocked outgoing traffic and the area lay below floodplain.

When the municipal corporation took its office in the century-old abandoned Simmons building in East Village, it had to install the telephone lines.

No private developer could risk the investment, she said. But the public money appears to have paid off.

In the past two years, East Village has attracted more than $720-million worth of private investment, she said.

One day, she hopes to see the area described as similar to Vancouver’s Gastown.

But Calgary is not a city with a long history of gentrification.

Long situated on grassland, it’s always had the luxury of growing out, not up.

“We had a focus on greenfield development in the city and that’s where we spent our time. Just now, really, in the last eight to nine years is the city examining its downtown core and understanding how more density can happen,” Ms. Veres said.

It’s a big shift, not only for city planners, but for its residents.

Calgarians have long “valued having homes outside the city, yards, yard work, being closer to the mountains,” she said. “The idea that we had a commute that was 30 minutes or an hour long didn’t bother us, but now there’s a shift and we see it across North America.”

And Calgary, which has historically never objected to another round of rowhouses on a seemingly limitless stretch of farmland, is changing its sprawling ways.

Denise Carbol, the senior planner with city-wide planning and design, said Calgary is now compiling a growth plan that should be presented to city council in October. It’s a follow on “Plan-It,” a framework approved in 2009 that acknowledged the need to embrace high-density living.

In short, growing outward has just become too expensive.

The larger a city’s footprint, the more expensive it is to build and maintain pipes and roads. Low density living means higher taxes. This is no minor point for a city expecting to more than double its population in coming decades.

“A more compact city costs less to build and operate,” she said. “That will cost 33% less over the next 60 years compared to continuing to grow the way we are now.”

Calgarians have long had a reputation for preferring suburbs, but that’s often been the result of city planning in a boom-bust town. The suburbs offer cheaper housing that can be built quickly, with little political opposition. The city has long bent the agenda to providing it.

But as Calgary grows, so do its commutes. Charron Ungar, the president of real estate developer AVI Urban, said the city is at a crossroads.

Its residents are no longer content with long drives to work; they want shops and restaurants close by, things suburbs can rarely accommodate.

East Village is an easy sell: Unlike other wealthy, established communities in downtown Calgary, no one is around to fight high-density housing projects.

That’s not the case in other areas. Attempts to create medium-rise apartments and townhouses are still associated with poverty here.

“As a city and a community, we’re having that push-and-pull, NIMBYism that is really dead set against allowing an increased density in these established communities,” he said.

Projects such as East Village may start to change the way Calgarians perceive the city.

“I think we’re going to see these established communities actually embrace [high density]. What we need is one type of scenario to set the bar.”